The global utility poles market size has been valued at $45.6 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $58.8 billion by 2026. Increased energy demand and the extension of current power networks are the main drivers of this market's growth opportunities. The energy transmission and distribution segment is the largest consumer of utility poles as compared to others.[1]
Wood is the pioneering material used in pole making and is highly adopted in such utility poles. They are still popular and widely used to carry electric power lines and telephone lines all over the world because of their high strength per unit weight, low installation and maintenance costs, and excellent durability when they are properly treated with wood preservatives. The majority of the poles supporting distribution systems across the world are wooden poles. As an indication, there are between 160 and 180 million wooden poles in the US. Similarly, around 5 million of the estimated 7 million utility poles in Australia are wooden poles. There are more than 10 million wooden utility poles in use in Turkey.[2]
Some of the major market players studied and profiled in the global utility poles market are Valmont Industries Inc., Skipper Ltd., Nippon Concrete Industries Co. Ltd., Elsewedy Electric Company, Hill & Smith Holdings PLC, Stella-Jones, FUCHS Europoles GmbH, Omega Factory, Pelco products Inc., RS Technologies Inc., Osmose and others.[1]
Wood is subject to deterioration, which can occur due to abiotic and biotic factors. Damage or deterioration of the pole can lead to outage of services and cause huge losses to organizations. Consequently, utility companies need to carry out periodic maintenance on poles to determine the extent of deterioration. Poles with significant decay are replaced while others are subjected to appropriate maintenance and contingency plans to reduce the effect of degradation and replace poles with significant decay.
Utilities and power companies must be meticulous in the timing and thoroughness of their pole and power line safety inspections. Failure to do so will cause maintenance workers and the public at large electrocution and shock injuries if there isn’t a safety inspection program in place to guard against deterioration of conditions and power line infrastructure. However, there are several challenges encountered by stakeholders today, as far as wooden pole maintenance is concerned. Some of them are listed below.
In conclusion, automated wooden pole inspection and maintenance is of current interest to several wooden utility pole companies as well as researchers/ academic institutions working in related areas [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. This can lead to several business opportunities in the global market too. If such a solution is to address several limitations and challenges in the current process of pole inspection, it is necessary to relook at the problem innovatively. By integrating nondestructive wood quality evaluation methods with relevant Robotics and AI technology solutions, it would be possible to achieve a reliable and optimized automated wooden pole inspection process. This is also hugely pertinent to Wipro’s current focus on custom robotics.
Dr. Sujatha J is academically qualified with a doctorate from IISc, Bangalore, and has over 30 years of teaching, research, and training experience across various renowned organizations. Currently, she is a senior consultant with the CTO office at Wipro. Her work is centered on the areas of AI, cognitive systems, and Custom Robotics. Her contributions are through the research and development of POCs for solving problems that are of customer interest, team development, and patent/white paper generation. To her credit, she has 17 international publications, and 11 patents filed, out of which five have been granted and the remaining pending. In addition, she constantly interacts with academia for mutual benefits. Dr. Sujatha also serves as a member of the industry advisory board for academia and is a member of IEEE, IETE, and ISTE, India.
Ramachandram Vedula is an Enterprise Architect with 25+ years of professional experience. Currently, he is a part of the Robotics practice group of the CTO organization where he leads the Warehouse Automation and Custom Robotics initiatives. Ram has a Mechanical Engineering background as well as strong and diverse IT systems field experience across various industry domains including Manufacturing, Consumer, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare, Banking etc. He has published research papers and spoken at international conferences. He has also led and participated in working groups to define solutions in Robotics, Automation, and IoT. Ram holds a Post Graduate Degree in Software Systems and is a Cloud and TOGAF certified Architect. He is also a member of the Fluid Power Society of India.
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